A mythology has spread in the MAGA world in recent months that the critics of President Trump’s tariffs were wrong. Few countries retaliated, the economy is great, and the late, great Adam Smith doesn’t know what time it is. Tell that to the investors whipsawed on Friday by the end of the U.S.-China trade truce.
Brian Albrecht tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
Here’s what we actually know:
– Tariffs raised goods prices significantly
– US firms/consumers are paying
– GDP effects are complicated by short timeframes and policy uncertainty
The Nobel committee called her “one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent time,” and we’d drop the geographic caveat. In the personal risks and sacrifices she has made for democracy, she sets an example for the world.
Educated as an industrial engineer, Ms. Machado has been a leader of the democracy movement in Venezuela for more than 20 years. In 2002 she watched Hugo Chávez destroy institutions and consolidate power. She resisted by co-founding the nonprofit Súmate—“Join” in English—to engage Venezuelans to become politically active.
…..
The peace prize will bring new world attention to the cause of Venezuelan freedom, which Mr. Trump also supports. We only wish the Nobel committee had made her a co-winner with Jimmy Lai, the publisher who’s been a political prisoner in Hong Kong for his fight for democracy. If Mr. Trump helps Ms. Machado and the Venezuelan people restore democracy, and helps free Mr. Lai from prison, the President will deserve the Nobel next year.
Joining in the just applause of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize award is León Krauze. Two slices:
The Nobel Committee in Oslo has awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado. It is an inspired choice.
For more than two decades, Machado has been one of the most courageous, consistent and articulate opponents of Venezuela’s barbaric Chavista regime. She has led the country’s democratic resistance against one of the most repressive dictatorships in the Americas. Standing firm against the autocratic system built up by Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, she has insisted on the democratic path — on voting, on citizenship, on hope.
…..
This remarkable courage is not only a testament to Venezuela’s struggle, but a warning to all democracies. In standing up to a regime built on intimidation and deceit, Machado has shown that the defense of liberty demands more than conviction. It demands endurance.
Her fight is Venezuela’s, yes. But her example is for the world.
In August, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, the institute successfully represented a death doula (doulas arrange logistical and other assistance for dying individuals and their families) in a First Amendment challenge to an Indiana law that protected the funeral industry from what it considers competition. The law required doulas to spend thousands of dollars acquiring a funeral home license and a funeral director license, to take irrelevant classes, and to purchase or rent a funeral home.
The Institute for Justice has steady work. The task of protecting Americans from protectionists will never end.
At the heart of the budget standoff that has the government shut down is Democrats’ insistence on extracting a laundry list of policy changes, including locking in the supposedly temporary, COVID-19–era expansion of Obamacare premium tax credits (or “Biden COVID-19 credits”). In essence, Democrats think the best way to lower health care costs is to direct more funding to insurance companies. This idea could not be more wrong. The credits are costly, poorly targeted and riddled with fraud, and do nothing to stop rising premiums.
Start with the price tag. Based on Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates, permanently extending the Biden COVID-19 credits would cost about $410 billion, including interest, over the next decade. Total spending over 10 years would amount to $488 billion. Funds would go straight to insurance companies to mask the real cost of coverage.
And let’s be clear: Those insurance premiums are rising for reasons subsidies can’t fix. According to the Economic Policy Innovation Center’s Gadai Bulgac, insurers themselves say individual-market premiums are on track to rise by roughly 18 percent in 2026, driven by the familiar culprits: soaring medical care costs, nurse and physician shortages, expensive specialty drugs like Ozempic, an aging population, wider use of high-end diagnostics, new tariffs on pharmaceuticals, and the lingering effects of inflation.
…..
Address the root causes of high costs. Expand the supply of care by modernizing scope-of-practice rules to reflect what nurses and physicians’ assistants do well. Adopt site-neutral payments to even out billing in different settings. Remove tariffs and trade barriers that raise drug and equipment costs. Speed approval of biosimilar and generic drugs.
The law went into effect in April 2024 and increased the hourly pay of an estimated half a million workers across the state. But without the law in place, thousands more workers would likely have been employed.
That’s the conclusion of “Did California’s Fast Food Minimum Wage Reduce Employment?” a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research by labor economists Jeffrey Clemens, Olivia Edwards, and Jonathan Meer.
The trio looked at fast-food employment in California and found a decline of 2.64 percent between September 2023 and September 2024—six months before and after the law went into effect. During that same time period, fast-food employment in the rest of the United States slightly increased.
Those different outcomes make it likely that the law caused fast-food businesses to hire fewer people, with a probable effect of lowering such employment 2.3 percent to 3.9 percent. At the middle of the range, that means about 18,000 fewer jobs in California.
Walter Olson is right: “Universities must defend their independence by rejecting Trump’s “compact.” A slice:
In a separate essay, First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh reaches similar conclusions and also identifies several other likely violations. For example, in a number of cases, courts have ruled that even where the federal government can properly direct that none of the money it bestows be spent to promote an ideological viewpoint, private organizations remain entitled under the First Amendment to express such a viewpoint with money they have raised elsewhere—a right the compact would deny them.
Volokh believes the Trump administration is also on shaky ground when it demands that universities “pledge to … screen out [foreign] students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.” He believes that the federal government could lawfully exercise its own immigration powers to apply such standards in screening the award of student visas but cannot properly conscript universities into being part of such an effort, especially employing screens that flagrantly reject content neutrality (better be respectful toward US “allies” and “values,” however someone in the Trump administration defines those this week) and which may clash with the university’s own values.
